Category Archives: Reframing

It occurred to me recently that we don’t give students enough credit when it comes to citation. If you ask faculty and librarians about student citation practices, they will bemoan students’ inability to cite correctly in the format of the faculty’s discipline. The faculty and librarian feelings surrounding this perceived inadequacy range from frustration (it’s a simple formula!) to condescension (if you can’t follow a simple formula, I really can’t help you) to superiority (if only you knew how important citation is, you’d do it properly) to punative (you can kiss those “easy points” goodbye). One possibility for students perceived inability to cite properly we haven’t considered in all of these really unattractive feelings is the role of basic incentives.

Consider your typical rubric. How many points out of the total are assigned to citation? Five out of 100? Given that small incentive to spend extra time after completing the more point-valuable requirements, is it possible that students aren’t incapable, but are simply making a calculated decision on where their time is best spent? Could it be, that rather than spending 30% of their time on 5% of the points, students are instead applying a rather effective impact/effort matrix to their assignments?

Faculty and librarians are often blinded by their own learning styles and motivations when it comes to interacting with students. While it would be unthinkable for many faculty and librarians not to actively attempt to exceed the instructor’s expectations, most students aren’t aiming to get 110% on an assignment. They’re just looking to get through. For many students, the possibility of achieving a max of 95% on the assignment is still a really great outcome. In that context, is it the fault of the students for not attempting 110%, or the fault of the faculty for not adjusting their rubrics to place higher value citation in context of the other requirements?

There is something to be said for properly valuing information and individual’s contribution to scholarship, the role of citation in a scholarly conversation, and other performative aspects of scholarship, but at the same time we as academics must unpack our own motivations behind citation. We cite because journals require us to cite. We cite because we are afraid of our scholarly communities calling us out for not citing. Both of these fundamental motivations are a much stronger incentive for us to cite than for a student to cite. Keeping our jobs is a pretty strong motivator. We expect that students will cite based on our own incentives, but we forget that their incentives are radically different than ours, especially when take on the whole of a life.

Maybe instead of condescending to students about their perceived inability to cite properly, we could instead acknowledge that if our incentives were theirs, they’d likely step up to the plate, too. And if their incentive were ours, on the whole we would be spending less time worried about correct citation too, professional ethics be damned.

(Don’t even get me started on the various citation formats, which, from a student perspective, are simply arbitrary and exist to make things complicated. I make it a point to never “teach citation” any longer, but when I do talk about citation in classes I point out how various citation styles highlight what’s important to a particular discipline, like I did in this long ago class. Providing an explanation isn’t going to change the incentive equation but it can demystify, which I believe is valuable in itself.)

I want to return for a minute to a chapter in James Lang’s Small Teaching, which I mentioned before felt relevant to library teaching. “Chapter 3: Interleaving” tackles the learning principle of distributed or spaced learning. The idea here is that massed or block practice (aka, cramming) is very effective for short-term retention but spaced learning is the clear winner for long-term and transferrable learning. The science points to memory retrieval being the key. Brown, Roediger, and McDaniel, quoted in Small Teaching and the authors of Making it Stick, offer the following explanation.

Embedding new learning in long-term memory requires a process of consolidation, in which memory traces (the brain’s representations of new learning) are strengthened, given meaning, and connected to prior knowledge – a process that unfolds over hours and may take several days. Rapid-fire practice leans on short-term memory. Durable learning, however, requires time for mental rehearsal… Hence, spaced practice works better. The increased effort to retrieve the learning after a little forgetting has the effect of retriggering consolidation, further strengthening memory.

Lang refers to interleaving as “spiraling.” “The first time you approach the material, you are making a single spiral at the bottom level,” he says. “The next time you return to it you are circling back through the material but at a slightly higher level. Spiraling can feel frustrating to the learner because you are, in a sense, going around in circles. However, you are also moving upward with each spiral, adding new layers of learning every time you push back through the material.” I like to think of this as switchbacks. Anyone who’s ever traveled in mountains is familiar with switchbacks. They’re a way to ascend or descend a steep slope by going in zigzags. Each zig takes less effort, albeit over a longer distance, than trying to go straight. Safer, too.

This idea, explained by Lang, immediately brought me to an “aha!” Library instruction is, at its core interleaving, and that’s actually optimal for what we’re trying to accomplish, which are skills for a lifetime, not momentary retrieval. The greatest gain in this idea isn’t in the suggestions he makes for enacting interleaving in the classroom but the language for taking what library instruction can do and explaining it scientifically rather than didactically. It is true that library instruction is typically in a one-shot format because of circumstance, but we can also reframe this circumstance to see it as a scientifically optimal way for achieving our goals. What would happen in our conversations with instructors and administration if we were able to bring research to bear on the necessity of including librarians frequently and at multiple points in a curriculum? “It’s important,” we say, and they nod, but what if we truly backed up our claims the way that students are required to in their papers?

The downside to this approach from the student perspective, as you have observed and Lang notes, is that students can find it frustrating. Students tell you (or tell their instructor, who then tells you) that they’ve “learned all this before.” They tell faculty that they don’t need you to come back to class, or the faculty themselves decide that the students have received enough instruction, usually at some removed distance from the class in question, and don’t need any more because “it’s been covered already.” Lang admits that “students might not respond with unbridled enthusiasm” to a fully interleaved approach, which is more intense than what is typical of library instruction. I admit that this lack of “unbridled enthusiasm” can create challenges to convincing instructors to include more library instruction, but it can also be the point at which we pull out the literature to back our claims. Consider: “Blocked study or practice deepens our association between a learned skill or concept and the specific context in which we learned it; interleaved learning, by contrast, forces us into frequent transfers of information and skills across contexts, which helps us develop the ability to recognize when a learned skill might apply in a new context.” The whole idea of transferability is the holy grail of education, and a good counterargument for the traditional assumptions regarding students ability to transfer skills between contexts and subject discourses.

The critical component here isn’t simply repeated exposure to the same material, but the incremental leveling up. It’s retrieval of previous information and the expectation of applying that information in a more advanced way each time it is reintroduced. This is what creates meaningful, lasting learning that persists beyond the classroom.

What would change if we reframed for ourselves the limits of one-shot instruction as interleaving, a scientifically optimal mode of learning for the long haul? What would happen if we communicated one-shot instruction this way to our students, faculty, and administration?

Welcome to an occasional series I’m calling REFRAMING. The idea behind the series is to take some common pain points for librarians and turn them around. You might as well call it “The Flip.” What I’m looking to do is take scenarios that are usually considered challenges and flip them into opportunities. This is an outgrowth of the work I currently do in supporting teaching librarians. It is, of course, just my own perspective, but I think there’s a lot of room in the world (especially today’s world?) for reframing. I’m an action oriented individual, and rather than wallowing in difficulty, I strive to look for the chance to do something about it, even if that something is just changing the way I’m thinking. Let’s consider the generic instruction request.

Here’s an accurate description, courtesy of a colleague: “We really need you to come do an instruction session. There’s no research assignment, but they are engaged in working on types of research for various other professors. Oh! And I won’t be there…” We’ve all been here, or some variation of here. These types of requests seem to be the bane of a librarian’s existence judging from conference and coffee break conversation. They feel disrespectful of our time and expertise. Convenient for the professor (the word “babysitter” comes to mind) but ultimately unhelpful for students. We mourn how much better a session could be with deliberate placement in the course, with some collaboration with the faculty member, with a damn assignment. Many librarians feel they can’t say no to this kind of request and resentment builds. In the instance of my colleague, above, she said that she already knew she was going to say yes, but that she struggled with how it felt. What to do? Put together a class while feeling disrespected or resentful?

First, let me say that “not at this time” is a valid response to this kind of request. Your time and expertise are valuable and possibly not best used by fulfilling this request in the spirit in which it was requested; however, there are reasons why you might say yes. I find that there is often a period of time at the beginning of a new job where you say yes to things that you don’t ultimately plan to say yes to in the long term, such as this kind of request. For one thing, these sessions can be really useful for learning about students and making connections with faculty that you later try to shift in a different direction. Ultimately, what we have here is an opportunity disguised as a challenge.

Here’s what I said to my colleague: “This kind of thing can be either a sad occurrence or a huge opportunity for you to do exactly whatever it is that you want to do and feel is most important without feeling like you have to meet faculty expectations. What do you think would be fun/necessary? Have you been itching to try something out? Talk about a concept? Fill in a blank? This is your opportunity. This is a place that the particular Frames you feel are important but underrepresented could find life. You’ve been given a whole class period to do exactly what you want. What do you want to do?”

What might happen if we got excited about this kind of request instead of feeling obligated to it?